ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly summarizes the history of the estate of merchants under Edward III by Stubbs. During the year 1336-7, the King, whilst, on the one hand, straining the machinery of the Constitution to secure the maximum of direct taxation, was, on the other hand, making continual use of the assemblies of merchants to obtain a maximum of indirect and unconstitutional taxation. The new and important phase in the history of the Estate of Merchants which had opened with the completion of the contract of July 26th, 1337, had come to an end in March 1338. The new arrangement therefore displaced a strict and narrow monopoly in the hands of forty-three merchants by an attenuated quasi-monopoly in the hands of a hundred and forty-two merchants. The Estate of Merchants, whether regarded as representative of class interests or as an instrument of royal policy, had been in process of disintegration since 1343.
